Tuesday, December 10, 2013

The Thing With Publishers

‘Kenyan publishers are
not that bad: at least when they reject your manuscript, they write the
rejection (note) personally.’ - Alexander Nderitu

‘Publishing must tread
the tightrope between art and commerce. Publishers want books they can publish with
pride and with passion but to survive, they must publish books that sell.’ – Michael Larsen, American
literary agent

I used to be very critical of publishers when I was younger but I have
since mellowed. The thing with publishing is that it’s lucrative but risky,
hence the much talked-bout ‘air of caution’ that blows throughout the business.
Speaking on TV a few years back, a Macmillan Kenya Publishers[1]official said
that to produce a quality book, from start to finish, costs about Kshs. 1 million.
If that is the case, then obviously no publisher is rich enough to risk a cool
million on every scribbler with a manuscript – hence rejection slips.

It’s true that Kenyan publishers have sacrificed many a good pop fiction
novel on the alter of text-book manufacture (I told you I’d find use for that
expression!) but it’s equally true that schools/schoolchildren are the biggest
buyers of books. I got that information from a self-published novelist who
realized that the copies he gave to bookshops would never move as fast as the
copies he sold to schools. For one, a school would by several copies for its
library while an individual would only buy a single copy. He now bypasses
bookshops and chases headmasters all over the country with copies of his novel.

The most common reason for rejection slips is sending your manuscript to
the wrong publisher eg. Mailing a novel manuscript to a textbook publisher, or
a secular manuscript to a publisher who is only interested in Christian works.
Even if it’s a good piece of fiction and the editor likes it, he still won’t
forward it for further consideration since it falls out of the publisher’s
sphere of interest.

The best way to choose a publisher is to analyze their current titles. The
book reviews are a good place to start. If a book being reviewed is up your
street, then you check out who the publisher is. Some publications even
serialize works of fiction eg. for kids. Since the author and publisher are
always credited, you can build your own list of publishers dealing in
children’s fiction. For the record, those publishers include:

The Jomo
Kenyatta Foundation

East
African educational Publishers

OxfordUniversity Press

Heinemann

Word Alive

Story Moja

DEFINATION OF PUBLISHING

Let me make it very clear that there is a big difference between publishers
and commercial printers. Printers (the people who ‘do’ your business cards,
letterheads, calendars etc) don’t publish anything. Neither does your computer,
despite the misguided term ‘desktop publishing.’ That’s just ‘printing’. A real
publisher does a lot more, including Editing, Cover Design, Illustrations,
Handling Legal Issues, Marketing, Distribution etc. In fact, the word ‘publish’
actually comes from ‘publicize’/‘to make public’. If you distribute literature
to the public, then that literature is said to be ‘published’. Now that we have
the Internet, a document that is being viewed by a large number of people (like
those Yahoo!, Daily Nation or e-zine articles) is ‘published’ (albeit ‘Internet
published’). On that front, the best example I can think of is the Kenneth
Starr Report.

Kenneth Starr was the man who tried to impeach US President Bill Clinton
over the Monica Lewinsky affair. When all was said and done, Starr posted his
entire report online for free. Such was the frenzy as millions scrambled for
the report that it broke a world record for number of people accessing a single
document at the same time. The Kenneth Starr report is therefore ‘published’
and was read by more people than would read your average best-selling novel. In
contrast to Kenneth Starr, a person who is sitting on top of all 500 copies of his
memoir that he had ‘pressed’ by a local printer is not ‘published’. At best,
he’s ‘printed’ (or ‘printed and bound’) but he still has a long way to go.
Here’s a final illustration, this time from The
Holy Bible. On hearing that Saul and his sons have been massacred by the Philistine
army, King David cries: ‘Tell it (the story of the tragedy) not in Gath, publish it not in Ashkelon;
lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice.’ (2 Samuel 1:20) As the
Gutenberg Press had not been invented, he obviously did not mean: ‘Don’t let
that story appear in the Daily Nation’
or ‘Don’t send the manuscript to Oxford University Press.’ He obviously meant:
‘Don’t relay the news (of the tragedy)’, or simply ‘Don’t publicize it’.

EDITORS

Every writer needs an editor. They are the
unsung heroes of the book world. The reason why self-published books often
come up short is because they’re not professionally edited. Theyusually have
typos, logical errors (eg. A character driving a 2011 S-Class Mercedes in a
story set in 2008) and weak points (that could have been improved on or done
without). The good thing with traditional publishers is that they have editors
who can help you prepare the manuscript for the next step. An editor explores
issues of plot, theme, characterization and language. He notes the ‘strong
points’ and the ‘weak points’ of the manuscript. Some publishers have what they
call an ‘in-house style’. It basically means conforming to a certain standard
but can involve such small details as the fonts used, single or double
quotation marks and the level of detail they want in descriptions. Again, the
Editor sees to it that the manuscripts conform.

It has been said that a local editor has about six manuscripts on his desk
at any one time. I tend to think that it’s ten or more. It appears that they
are usually swamped and that’s why they take so long to get back to you on your
manuscript. Some publishers are now hiring ‘readers’, the way Hollywood movie
studios used to. This helps the publishers move faster through the ‘slush pile’
looking for publishable material. When Yusuf K. Dawood won the 2011 Jomo Kenyatta
Prize for Literature for his book The Eye
of the Storm, his publisher came under fire for having ‘sat’ on the
manuscript for years. In a swift rejoinder, through the press, another writer defended
the publisher, East African Educational Publishers, saying that the win was
actually proof of EAEP’s professionalism in not ‘rushing’ the book (but doing a
good job of developing it instead). EAEP has a long history of winning prizes.
The inaugural Wahome Mutahi Prize for Literature, for example, went to Onduko
Bw’Atebe for Verdict of Death (EAEP,
2006). The secret to their success, according to EAEP’s head of publishing, is
in ‘manuscript selection and editing.’

All editors are not created equal. Take magazine editor Wayua Muli, for
example. She helmed the ground-breaking Saturday
magazine pullout in the Daily Nation.
It was definitely a game-changer with its spicy stories, lots of colour and
layer of glamour. When she left, the magazine changed (for worse). It later morphed
into a woman’s magazine. But if you could get your hands on one of the original
issues, you would see the difference. Ms. Muli was also initially at the helm
of the E. A. Standard’s youth
entertainment magazine Pulse. When
she left, there was a noticeable change. She has since taken her magic touch to
glossy magazines such as Eve Girl and
others. It reminds me of movie director Stephen Spielberg (Jaws, E.T., Schlindler’s List, JurassicPark,
The Lost Word). While the scripts/stories are written by others (Jaws was based on the novel by Peter
Benchley; Jurassic Park and The Lost World were novels by Michael
Crichton) and acted out by some of the biggest actors in Hollywood, there’s no
denying that Spielberg makes every film his own. The effect can’t be defined;
it’s just some kind of ‘Spielberg magic’.

SELF-PUBLISHING

A lot has been said about self-publishing. Most people self-publish their
books when they can’t get a publisher or they have a book that is unlikely to
appeal to a mass audience, like a memoir. Many Kenyans have gone the
self-publishing route, which is encouraging because, as we shall see,
self-publishing will be much more affordable in future. Kenyans who have no
regrets about self-publishing include Anthony Gitonga (For This Cause, Made For Greatness) who mainly writes motivational
material.

There’s what is commonly referred to as ‘vanity publishing’ or the ‘vanity
press’. This is a situation where a person has a manuscript (probably not
publishable material) and simply pays a printing press to produce a certain
number of copies. The problem with these invoice-the-author vanity presses is
that they offer no ‘book development’. It’s all mechanical. They may as well be
pressing restaurant menus or next year’s calendars. Once the author gets his
copies, he realizes that the hard work is only beginning: he now has to seek
his own publicity; approach bookshops, schools and libraries; handle arising
issues (like poorly bound copies being returned); do his own sales tracking and
so on. If only he had a publisher!

There’s another more professional approach to self-publishing:

The author approaches a self-publishing firm that charges more but offers
further ‘author services’ eg. Editing, Getting ISBN numbers and Marketing.
Locally, such outfits include Big Books Ltd. In the digital age, these ‘author
services’ firms can be found online and they offer a ‘menu’ in order to fit the
author’s pocket. For example, an author may want 500 paperback books with an
ISBN number but he can’t afford to take the Marketing option. The best known such
company is iUniverse. Others include AuthorHouse, Infinity Publishing, Llumina
Press and Aventine Press. If they handle all aspects of publishing, one might
ask, then why aren’t they publishers? ‘Author services’ firms do exactly that –
they offer services to authors. They don’t analyze/reject manuscripts, they
don’t ‘sign you up’, they don’t promote you (eg. Submitting your book to award
contests), they take no responsibility for your content, they don’t own any of
the rights (you’re even free to engage other author services) and so on. A
traditional publisher is more caring; they invest in your work and can be sued
over the publication. Once they’re in, they’re in. You can’t order them to just
print out a thousand copies and slap on an ISBN number and barcode. It has to
be a committed relationship. And anyone else publishing the same book as the
first publisher is a pirate and can be arrested. In addition, there are many
websites where you can send a manuscript for review. These include
BookConnector and Bookpleasures.com.

Another option for the would-be author is the Print-On-Demand (POD) system
that has been made possible by digital printing technology. Remember when if
you needed to print somethingcommercially, you had to order a certain minimum
or incur losses? All that is gone. With POD (next-generation publishing) you
can order one copy of anything! Welcome to the future.

POD (a branch of the larger Manufacture-On-Demand paradigm) is not another
passing cloud. It’s a new economic model that helps eliminate waste (of money,
resources, storage space etc). It’s especially good for specialized books that
aren’t expected to sell very many copies eg. biographies, photo albums, books
on gardening, interior design etc. Even traditional publishers can make their
out-of-print titles available via POD.

Print-On-Demand does not refer to e-books. A POD book is a real book with
glossy covers, printed pages and so on. The only difference is that a copy is
produced only when a customer places an order. There’s no initial ‘print run’,
no inventory.

I am deeply involved with POD systems. In my view, POD is the closest we
have come to a ‘Promised Land’ for writers. Almost anyone sitting on a
manuscript can now be published, as long as he or she is willing to do their
own marketing. You can also buy ISBN numbers and barcodes which enable your
book to enter the mainstream book market and may be made available at Amazon.com
(by far the world’s biggest seller of e-books) and Barnesandnoble.com.

I am a prose writer but I’ve always loved poetry, especially the classics.
Occasionally, I pen a poem, usually following a burst of inspiration (For
example, I wrote Remember the Lions
after watching the movie The Ghost and
the Darkness). Since my job as Web Designer compels me to spend almost the
entire day online, in the mid-2000’s, I started posting individual poems online
to see what other people thought of them. After getting encouraging comments
from such websites as Authorsden.com,
I started thinking of looking for a publisher instead of posting for free. I downloaded
the poems (14 at the time) and sent them to Sasa Sema Publications. I had seen the
Sasa Sema founder, Lila Luce, (a wonderful, wonderful, lady) on TV some years
earlier talking about her business and calling for manuscripts. Some time
later, I received a letter informing me that they could not publish my
manuscript. Not long afterwards, however, Lila (who I only recently discovered
is the grand-daughter of Time magazine
founder, Henry Luce) called me up and said that Sasa Sema would be interested
in publishing the material. She liked the poems even the first time, she said,
but back then they were not considering poetic works. I asked if I could write
more poems so that they would be enough to make a book and she agreed. Alas, my
poetry muse visits about as often as Haley’s Comet and I took too long to
complete the manuscript. One night, I was watching the news when I learnt that
Sasa Sema Publications was being absorbed by Longhorn Publishers. I knew that
was bad news for me. I have a very experimental way of writing (‘Rules are what
the artist breaks’ – Bill Bernbach) and I doubted that the larger publisher,
which deals mainly in textbooks, would take to the poems. Lila forwarded my
manuscript to Longhorn but, as expected, they did not proceed with publication.

With about 50 poems in my collection, I returned to the Internet to look
for other publishing options and discovered Print-on-Demand for the first time.
My poetry book, The Moon is Made of Green Cheese,
is currently available on the POD website Lulu.com, both as an
e-book (cheaper, faster to get) and a bound copy. Potential buyers can read the
first ten pages for free. Free samples of the poems are also available on my
official website, www.alexandernderitu.com

As of late 2011, The Moon is Made of
Green Cheese is also available on the Amazon
Kindle.

Lulu.com is a US-based company that provides a robust online sales and
distribution platform for a wide variety of products, from photo albums to comic
books. Once a buyer orders a book, Lulu prints, binds and ships the book in 4-6
days. US
customers receive their orders faster since they’re in the same country as the
publisher. In 2006, Lulu.com received a Web 2.0 Award for their Books category.
In the Lulu system, the author sets the cover price, chooses the type of
binding (stapled, perfect bound etc), designs his own covers (or chooses from
group of templates) and retains all the intellectual property rights. You can
even decide whether your book will be a hardback or a paperback.

About Me

Born on April 23rd just like William Shakespeare, I have dabbled in
just about every type of writing. My books include: 'When the Whirlwind
Passes'(suspense novel), 'The Moon is Made of Green Cheese' (poetry
anthology), 'Kiss, Commander, Promise' (short story anthology) and 'Africa on My Mind'. They are available as paperbacks and e-books at Lulu.com: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/NewShakespeare